Being Religious

The freedom to choose a religion

Nov 16, 2005

Claudia Pearson

The Tot Finder fire safety sticker beckoned me inside my childhood home, set on one of the rolling hills of Appalachia in a neighborhood filled with flowering rhododendrons. The sticker was familiar, albeit faded from almost three decades of exposure to the sun. I remembered fondly the girl who put it on the window to mark her bedroom. She was 11, a Muslim daughter of India, and an immigrant to America at the age of 4.

I crossed the threshold of my girlhood home in Morgantown, West Virginia, in the spring of 2003 as a 37-year-old single mother and author with my newborn son, Shibli, in my arms. After jetting from world capitals to Buddhist meditation caves as a writer and reporter for the Wall Street Journal, I had returned to my hometown to raise my son.

The 1970s split-level, three-bedroom house was not the home of my dreams, with its dark faux wood trim and aluminum siding. But, unplanned, it was the place where I could most clearly hear the voice of my younger self. So often we live out a script that was written when we were young.

It seemed my life script was to be a good girl. I earned straight A's and played by the rules, whispering my thoughts into a journal, which I wrote in while sitting behind the Tot Finder sticker in my former bedroom. As adults, we rarely get to return to the place our scripts were written, but I got that opportunity by moving back to my childhood home.

I returned to the kitchen where I had sat around a table with the women while the men occupied sofas in the living room and debated politics. My parents encouraged me as a writer and thinker, but my immigrant community imported gender barriers that kept women silent behind walls, both physical and psychic. As I grew up, I never felt I could enter the men's space — except to whisper messages from my mother to my father to stop talking so loudly. I was a good girl.

Walking through the house, I returned to my bedroom where an older relative lay upon me, introducing me shockingly to male erections. "Hey!" was all I could scream. I didn't feel I had a right to challenge a man, and I kept that moment of horror a secret for the next 15 years. I was a good girl.

I returned to a thin green journal that I filled for my seventh-grade English teacher, Mrs. Alke. In the back, I wrote about my girlhood confrontations with gender discrimination. One night I enjoyed a Hindu holiday called Diwali. "Us girls had relay races in the hall and arm wrestling," I wrote. "It was fun all in all." I continued: "The next night . . . there was an Islamic association party. It stunk! The ladies had to go up to a little efficiency apartment, because they weren't to sit with men." I didn't protest. I was a good girl.

But my younger self echoed the loudest in the most unexpected of places: my place of worship. One evening in October 2003, I piled Shibli into his car seat and drove about a mile to a new mosque my father had helped build. I was eager to teach my son religion. To my shock, an elder greeted us at the front door and yelled, "Sister! Take the backdoor!" I proceeded through the front door, stunned. But the fearful little girl in me wouldn't take the front stairwell into the main hall, and instead guided me to the back stairwell and a secluded balcony, where I sat with the other women, seething.

Sitting there, I realized, as an adult, that the separate but unequal standards had deep implications. They represented the closed doors on a community that desperately needed to open its doors — not only to women but to people of all faiths. The adult woman in me knew I had a right to challenge the inequities. The girl within me was still afraid. I had to look her directly in the eyes, speak softly, and communicate one message to her: "It'll be okay." As a nurturing mother to my son — and to my younger self — I overcame my fears and ascended into the main hall 11 days later.

Over the months, the good girl kept surfacing. Each time I told her, "It'll be okay." A man stood at the mosque pulpit and declared unchaste women to be "worthless." My memory returned to the kitchen table where my mother wept when I told her that I'd lost my virginity as a single woman. As an adult, I knew a woman's sexuality didn't define her worth as a human being. So I challenged the sermon, my mother sitting beside me.

Another man told me that I had shamed the community when I wrote publicly about inequities women face. I remembered hours in my bedroom, writing in my secret journals. Now I knew that I had to bear witness to injustices if we were going to right them. I had started a travelogue about my pilgrimage to Mecca for the Islamic holy pilgrimage of the hajj. I transformed it into a manifesto reclaiming the rightful place of women in Islam. And, instead of a simple book tour, I mapped a Muslim Women's Freedom Tour with an Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in Mosques and an Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in the Bedroom.

As a girl, I used to stare at my bedroom walls and dream about filling the white, like in a coloring book, with swaths of magnificent yellow. I never did, to respect my parents' wishes. But as a 39-year-old in the winter of 2004, I stayed up into the wee hours, dipped my paintbrush into a gallon of Olympic Premium yellow, and painted the walls of that bedroom the color I'd always envisioned.

In our lives, we can change our life script. And we can make external changes that are the physical manifestations of our internal changes. I transformed more than just my girlhood bedroom into an office. I transformed my relationship with the girl in me. After walking in the shadow of my younger self, I embraced her with a simple message: "Thank you. I'll take over now — as an adult."

The dawn arrived and the sun splashed through the Tot Finder sticker onto me and the walls of my new office. I moved my old desk into the office and put a smaller version of it across from me for my son. Now I sit at my desk, gazing at the small one with its child chair, and give voice to the dreams of my younger self.

Asra Q. Nomani is the author of the newly released Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam. She still lives in Morgantown, West Virginia, with her son, Shibli. You can follow her Muslim Women's Freedom Tour at AsraNomani.com.

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